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Tag Archives: components

In case you missed it, a couple of days ago an article I wrote a while ago went live in Adobe Devnet
The article summarizes a set of best practices to configure your projects on Flash Builder and Eclipse in general for maximum efficiency and reduced maintenance effort.
As a software engineer joining a new project, I […]

In this post I’ll explain how you can develop a flex library that automatically initializes itself avoiding developers the hassle of remembering how, when and where the libraries need to be initialized and hooked into the application. This can be particularly helpful for debugging libraries like fxSpy, DeMonsterDebugger, KaptInspect, mrdoob, etc. and extremely useful to […]

In this post I explain how you can catch unhandled exceptions or errors globally in a declarative mxml-based way using the [Mixin] flex-specific metadata tag.
Starting on FP 10.1 and AIR 2.0 you can capture unhandled exceptions or errors globally. Although you can use these new APIs you should always take care of the exceptions where […]

This week I’ve been discussing with Alberto from undefined.es different ways to implement a reversible panel. Basically a reversible panel would be a 2-sides panel. In the front part you could have the component or widget and in the back you could have a configuration panel (same concept as in the OSX Dashboard widgets).
One way […]

Template Components can be quite common in different sort of applications. Maybe the most common one is the Panel, which has a predefined set of components (title bar, status bar, close button, etc) and an specific area where we can instantiate any other component we wish.
In Flex3 you could use the technique explained in the […]

The trick to writing a plugin architecture for AIR applications isn’t really so much plugin management (installing, loading, deleting, etc.) as it is plugin security. Plugins that are privileged enough to be really powerful also have enough power to be potentially dangerous, so before an end user installs one, he or she needs to know not only who wrote it, but also that the plugin wasn’t somehow modified prior to installation. That’s where code signing and validation come in.

The sample plugin architecture I wrote addresses both plugin management and security. The article contains plenty of background on plugin security as well as sample code for an application called "Pluggable SearchCentral" which you can see in action below:

The Flex family extends far beyond the Flex Framework and the Flash Builder IDE. A lot of third party vendors have created applications, frameworks, components and tools to help you be successful in your application development. There are tools for functional, performance and security testing, third party components, AMF products, licensing and encryption tools and […]

At Adobe MAX this week, I presented a session entitled “Working with Flash Catalyst Projects in Flash Builder 4″ – the recording for this will be available on Adobe TV in the future, in the meantime however I’ve posted the slides below.

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The presentation builds on the Exploring Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder workflows article that was published on the Adobe Developer Connection site, but also includes some example code which may help if you wish to explore the use of Flash Catalyst generated skins for custom Flex components that extend SkinnableComponent.

Flex developers: Secure your applications with the Flexible Chimp project and Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Ryan Knight and Jon Rose show you how in their article, Enterprise security for Flex.

If you want to learn more about ActionScript programming in Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, you’ll want to watch Doug Winnie’s recent ActionScript video tutorials. In these videos, Doug teaches designers how to code interaction and animation, as well as basic programming concepts. Also be sure to check out the Components Learning Guide for Flash CS4 It will help you reduce your development time and effort by using building blocks for creating rich interactive applications on the web.

For the more advanced crowd, ActionScript expert Colin Moock’s Lost ActionScript Weekend turns a fireside chat with friends into a series of real-world lessons about ActionScript 3.

If you’re curious as to how you can query code examples inline from your development environment, Blueprint is definitely worth your while. Blueprint was released last week on Adobe Labs with support for Flex Builder 3 and Flash Builder 4.

Blueprint is an innovative code-centric search application, initially delivered as an Eclipse plug-in. It is a custom search tool that searches only for code (for now, it searches just for MXML and ActionScript). So, for example, if you search for DataGrid, it returns a set of code examples that use the Flex DataGrid control. But what’s really cool is that you can easily highlight, copy, and paste chunks of code right into your application, all without leaving Flex/Flash Builder.

For more information, please see the Blueprint site on Adobe Labs and you can find more examples here.